Fairy Tales
by StrawberryFunk
Summary: Two princesses send love letters, make wishes, and dream of princes that are never to come (and write their own fairy tales in the end).


The first love letter comes on the second Thursday of March with the biweekly delivery planes, tied with string to a cardboard box no bigger than her Cookalizer. Jade doesn't notice it until she's brought all of the wooden supply crates inside and has started prying them open with a crowbar to go through food cans and thread spools and batteries like always. Once one is sorted through she shoves it out of the way, and there behind it sits the box and its letter in plain sight. The envelope hardly sticks when she opens it, and when she takes out the sheet of paper inside, she can't recognize the handwriting. There's no return address available and the only thing on the pristine white packaging is her own address, typed and printed onto the label.

Now her fingertips are tingling in anticipation where they hold this mysterious letter, and it starts "Dear Jade" in clumsy cursive (or just particularly loopy print) and ends with "your secret admirer," and it declares "something I've needed to tell you" and words like "beautiful' and "charming" and "the greatest joy to know." It waxes tentative poetic that reads symphonic to a lofty little dreamer of a twelve-year-old.

Postscript on the back reminds her about the box—right, right; her stomach is still fluttering up a storm of butterfly wing beats and her face still feels like a fever or a fire or a geothermal heater, but she makes a conscious effort to take her focus off of that so she can tear open the cardboard lid and pull out the tissue paper with hands that just barely tremble with all of her excitement. Underneath it all sits a tiny plush octopus made of periwinkle fabric and adorned with a silver crown placed off-kilter on its head. It's a Squiddle, and when she lifts it up in her cupped hands to get a closer look she realizes that it's not just any Squiddle but _Princess Berryboo_, in all of her limited edition glory. After she can think past her excitement she wonders, _how did anyone get this_, and then, _how did they know it would be perfect?_

She inspects every piece of it as thoroughly as she can; every crinkle in the packaging and every side of the box, but nothing at all even hints at her admirer's identity. Jade sets Princess Berryboo in her lap and holds the letter in her hands, reads it again and again and again, and occupies herself with dreams and fairy tale fantasies for many minutes before remembering, at last, the rest of her delivered supplies and her usual sorting routine.

• • •

"Somebody _loves_ me!" she gushes to a Prospitian who watches with vicarious delight as Jade spins and hovers in circles around her and the balcony they're meeting at. She tucks her legs in underneath her to fidget with her skirt and practically cries, "They said I was as pretty as a princess. They called me beautiful!"

"Do you know who it is?" asks the Flighty Fashionista, focused intently on Jade's movements. She carefully lowers down to sit opposite FF at the little round table and sighs, "Well, noooo... But that's exciting too! I have a _secret_ admirer!"

"You have to have a guess."

"It...hm. It must be somebody from my Squiddle forums! There was a Squiddle in with the package that I didn't have. But there are a whole lot of people on the forums..."

"Maybe they'll send you another letter, and that will give you a better idea."

"Do you think so?!" She fights to keep herself from rising back into the air again in her elation at the thought. With an amused little smile, FF answers, "If they love you, they will."

"I hope so!" Jade props her elbows up on the table to rest her face in her hands and, with a dreamy sigh, goes on, "I know exactly what it is going to be like when I find him. He is going to do something brave and daring and...you know, princely! Maybe rescue me from a dragon. So he will be my prince and I will be his pretty princess, just like he said. Like in a fairy tale! And we are going to live—"

"Happily ever after?"

"Happily ever after!" she finishes, and practically sings in her joy.

• • •

In her tower, Rapunzel waited.

She sat prim and patient on her stool, back up straight, smile unfaltering, all stone still aside from her hands. A ribbon made of silk winded in between her fingers. She stroked at the edges, frayed from constant touch, and looped it around her hand just to undo it and start again, over and over again. For a princess, she was very fidgety, but she was also very dark-haired and even though it cascaded down her back and across the chamber floor like it was supposed to, it wasn't spun from gold, so she could deal with holding another flaw.

The window opposite her showed skies bluer than anything she had ever seen in her life; green hills that waved and rolled into the horizon like they were their own ocean; meadows made up of an entire color spectrum that swayed and danced for the passing wind; and at the skyline, the peak of a silhouette of a city where people laughed and sang and spoke and touched and hugged and held right there with each other, in a world where they were together.

She'd get to the world beyond that window someday. It was waiting for her; she heard the birds themselves call _Rapunzel, Rapunzel_. But the tower rose too high and she was ever so breakable when it all came down to it.

The birds and meadows all waited for her, and Rapunzel waited in regal silence for her prince to take her there.

• • •

The second love letter comes two months later and speaks to her more boldly than the first, and her secret admirer tells her that her joy is "rapturous" upon finding out how well their letter was received. She shrieks to nobody at all, "I _knew_ it!" and swoons backwards to lay on top of the unopened supply crate she's decided to use as a seat. Her Squiddle-centered Casanova had seen her post on the forums! The rest of it reads with confidence gained from her approval, and Jade eats up every description of how elating it is to experience her joy even if secondhand, how radiant it must have been all across the island when she'd smiled at the gift, how her happiness was the world and her admirer (her _prince_) would do anything for it. Again, this one ends with a reminder about the box included and this time she pulls out one packet of seeds after another. Sticky notes on their backs explain that "this one is symbolic of inviolable love, like I have for you" and "this one symbolizes my true love and affection" and "royalty has always been associated with this one" and teasingly, "this one is a symbol of anonymity." What a poet her prince is!

When she's done going through her presents, she takes the crowbar out of the supply closet and rips the covers off of the crates. She sorts through bags of dirt, sacks of potatoes, boxes and boxes of bandages, and an entire package of candlesticks. They are taken, sorted, and stored, just as always, but then the letter is pinned up next to the first on her wall and she skips along to tend to her garden.

• • •

During her next nap, Jade finds the Meticulous Florist to teach her about her new gifts and he brings her to the roof of his store to the outdoor planters and carefully explains each and every one of the flower names she gives her.

"Did you know that those ones are associated with royalty?" she asks while he pats at the soil of an iris plant.

"I did not," he answers.

"My secret admirer chose it for me because I am going to be his princess," she declares and her eyes wander away from the plant. MF purses his lips but when he turns and catches the dreamy look in Jade's eyes, his face softens and he says, "Although you are a princess already." Her brow furrows and she brings her attention back to the plants, poking at the first pot's twin to match MF's movements. "Does that count?"

"Why wouldn't it? My dear, you are our princess here. No prince needs to coronate you."

MF's carapaced body does not look or feel like skin, as it is with the rest of the Prospitians', but it looks, suddenly, all too much like it; there are wrinkles worn into the corners of his eyes and the edges of his mouth, and when he smiles at her they grow more pronounced.

For a few moments she thinks about this, touching a dirty hand to her face in thought and streaking soil across her chin without realizing. At last, she asks, "Can I be your princess _and_ his?" It isn't a request or a need for permission.

"Mind the iris," is what MF has to say to that, and she snaps her attention towards the golden watering pail resting at the table's edge. He guides her hands as she pours it and jerks the spout away when he's decided it's been given too much. "They need a little more care, but not that much."

"Can I?" This time, she insists. MF's wrinkles crease at the brow and chin; Jade doesn't think she's ever met a carapace older than him (she's never been sure if they aged).

He lightly touches a finger to a little red bud that she can recognize as a carnation; it is the first in a line in a rectangular box to start to form an almost-flower from the pink blushing on the rests' leaves. "You are you, princess. You are yours as we are yours." After he only follows up with silence, she almost pleads, "I don't understand."

"Neither do I," he says, "for I am not a princess."

But _she_ is. Perhaps not a very good one, she thinks, when she has no ideas of who rules who.

• • •

Sometimes the birds would alight in her window and rest on the sill to visit her. The visits grew more and more frequent as time went on, and soon squirrels and chipmunks would learn to scramble up the tower sides to join along. Eventually they all began to bring Rapunzel gifts: in their beaks and paws they held leaves or flowers by their stems or piles of petals that they dropped into her open hands, and some would take leaves and stray bits of twigs and strings that didn't quite make it into the nest. With all of the graciousness in the world Rapunzel would take these little pieces of the outside world and make herself flower crowns and laurels. She hung acorns from her wrists, thinking they had a strangely quaint charm, and strung all of the petals and buds in the world through all of her hair. Sometimes they would bring thorns upon things, oblivious to her unfamiliarity instead of malicious, and she would cut her fingers trying to weave them into the rest of her. None of it continued to bother Rapunzel for long, though; she learned to work with fingers bloodied by pinpricks and hands that were never completely clean of the dirt that came with everything else.

"There's so much more out there," the creatures would all tell her, "You need to come see it!"

And each time Rapunzel would tell them with exasperation (but more and more often, desperation), "I would love to, but I _can't_. Not on my own."

But the ground always seemed to come closer when she peered out of her window, and yet the city was always so far away.

• • •

When the third love letter comes, Jade has already found a box in old storage rooms that she had sealed away years and years ago. It's one of Grandpa's old things, and as most of his things are, it's covered in the world; it's patterned with a yellowed map that certainly can't be up-to-date and half a compass rose that she thinks was pointing in the wrong direction before somebody smeared the ink. Time has been good to the hinges, at least, or at least Grandpa knew how to maintain these things (or perhaps it was just a dinky little thing sitting at a discount in the souvenir shop), so she decides it reliable enough for practical use.

This one says that she is like Snow White in her fairness (_I would daresay the fairest of them all_); she shines more radiant than Cinderella herself even outside of any ball; the Little Mermaid would envy the sound of her voice (as if she has any penchant for singing in actuality, but because she is young and foolish and in a place where nobody can tell her that she cannot hold a pitch she basks in the comparison); and she is Sleeping Beauty in every lovely little way so rest, dear princess, let yourself fall to sleep and sail among the skies and clouds where royalty belongs. Inside the box (again, she is reminded of it; _and I give you the stories of the women who must have been in the mind of whatever may have allowed you these things_) is what ties it all together: it reads FAIRY TALES in complicated script font laid on top of a quaintly styled picture of a fair, slender woman with flowing hair the color of Prospitian towers standing in a forest and holding her arm out to let a mockingbird (one of the many forest creatures surrounding her) with outstretched wings light onto her finger. The table of contents on one of the first pages has stars penned in beside page numbers telling her which ones are to be read first.

For a few moments she is torn between her organizational responsibilities of the crates set in front of her and the magnificent world that her new storybook promises, but out of nowhere comes a yawn and her eyes snap shut, and Jade inelegantly slips to the ground with her arms folded under her head but on top of the book. In her sleep she snores and snorts, and in her dreams she is a princess despite that.

• • •

In a city surrounded by vast meadows and countless kinds of vegetation, a girl sat in her room. Like every day she had piles of paper at her desk in front of her. For the most part, any that weren't blank were crumpled into ink-splattered balls hat were strewn around her feet. At times her cat would crawl in to play with them, but the incessant meowing and crinkling sounds would take away all of her focus so she would have to shoo little Jaspers out into the kitchen again.

Over time she had written many letters and discarded most, but even those she seemed suitably eloquent and not terribly embarrassing were a futile effort. She was no prince, nor was she a shining knight or some other brave and robust savior; she was just a young seer. She could wax poetic all that she wanted (indeed, it seemed all that she was good at) but no medium like her could ever hold onto a heart of one so fine.

The girl had heard legends of the tower built far beyond their city and the princess who was locked away there. She had even seen her in the crystal ball she kept. This city would not let her leave, though, even if she had the means (or the courage to be alone with her and in sight of her beautiful face). So she was to wait until the princess found her way down those tower walls and brought herself here to her.

• • •

If she is Snow White and Rapunzel and Sleeping Beauty and all of these others, then the book must be an incredible adventure. She opens it up with that thought, and flips to the pages her admirer as marked in the margins with expectations of adventure on the grandest scale. But this is what Jade finds instead:

Snow White runs in fear from the man with the knife and the woman with the mirror, and she does not go back. She does nothing but sing and dance and make a nice clean house, and die and get kissed by a man who wasn't even looking for her.

The Little Mermaid tells of her greatest wish to the world and Jade is sure that this is the one. She is Ariel, even her world is above the sea line just as much as theirs, until the sacrifice she makes isn't for that dream, not _really_, but for some boy she likes the looks of.

Cinderella is only good at two things (three, if you count crying): cleaning and being subservient. It takes all of the logic and reason Jade has in her to keep herself from screaming at the book; that atrocious stepmother of hers has the girl under her thumb with no good reason, but why doesn't she _say_ something? What if she said no, what if she threw the dustpan away, what if she yelled and spat and raised hell against the bitter witch who made her life the same? What if she just _left the goddamn fireplace alone_? She doesn't make a scene and she doesn't even earn her spoils; some bored fairy takes pity on her and gives her all she could ever ask for, if only for a night, and she gets it back by being a clumsy broad.

Sleeping Beauty is given the world; she has beauty and song and blessings. She never works for them, never fights with them, and her only struggle is sleep. It strikes a chord somewhere that throbs in her chest, and her grip starts to wrinkle the pages when a prince she does not know slays a dragon while she is oblivious and useless in her bed.

And Rapunzel—Rapunzel sits and waits and lets her hair grow (like she could even stop it!). The most effort she ever expends is tossing all of it out the window for the prince waiting on the ground to scale her tower and free her from her prison. Why, laments Jade, can't she just tie up her own damn hair?

First she decides that she is no princess; she will be ugly and raspy-voiced and sleepless for the rest of her life if it means that she doesn't become useless and complacent. She will force herself to rely on no one; she is going to save her own damn self and everybody else that she has to, too.

She knows that it's in vain but she looks for a return address on the box anyway, but this time she does not want to gush and cry and swoon—she wants to give whoever thought that princesses were any sort of idol a piece of her mind.

• • •

"Why don't you leave, Rapunzel?" a bird asked one day.

"I _can't_." This, perhaps, was the hundredth time it had to be said.

"But Rapunzel," the little blue jay insisted, "what is keeping you here?"

She faltered. "I-I need a prince to—"

"Why can't you leave on your own?"

The bird was not contrary or ill-intentioned, only young and on a search for sense and answers about its world. But for a few long moments, Rapunzel could not give either.

"Something keeps me here," she said at last, slowly. "I am trapped and guarded." The bird asks, "By what?" but it had been so long that she'd forgotten.

"Nothing is here though, is there?" a squirrel asked in a hushed tone.

"Of course there is," she snapped, and her hands were clenching against the window sill and she did not even notice.

"Rapunzel, this place has been empty for so long," murmured an owl, a knowledgeable old fellow who defied his sleep schedule to bring her flowers and tell her their stories. Something did not seem to add up to him, and he spoke with cautious meticulousness. "You are all that's left in here."

"But," began Rapunzel, and she had no more words to say. That was impossible; she was a princess, and princesses were kept in hiding by evil dragons or wicked stepmothers who were short-haired and ugly and probably very fidgety, and princesses were rescued by princes of the highest level of valor. Princesses did not sit, left to rot, and wicked step mothers never died of old age!

She ran to the door on the other side of the room, stumbling over her own toes, and it was locked. It always _had_ been. She pulled at the door handle, she slammed her shoulder into it, she kicked it and beat it in a desperate frenzy to leave her wretched room. And yet it did not budge. It had never budged. In spite of everything else, this did not change.

"Rapunzel?" cooed the little blue jay, but she had fallen to her knees and held her head against the door, and the sound of an ocean raging against her ears put together by tears she put all of her effort into holding back drowned out all else that was said.

• • •

- gardenGnostic [GG] began pestering tentacleTherapist [TT] –-  
GG: rose?  
GG: i have a question for you!  
TT: A question for me?  
GG: yes that is exactly what i just said :p  
TT: Normally it's you that has all of the answers.  
GG: well i think it is more that i would like your opinion on something  
GG: and i know it probably is going to sound kind of silly  
GG: but just play along with this ok?  
TT: This is sounding more and more intriguing by the minute. What is it?  
GG: what do you think about princesses?  
GG: you know  
GG: the kind you read about in fairy tales  
GG: not actual monarchs! queen elizabeth was very cool but she is also not the subject i would like to discuss  
GG: but like snow white and rapunzel  
GG: and sleeping beauty  
GG: rose?  
TT: Sorry, I was just thinking.  
TT: I think they are a fundamental part of a lot of our cultural roots in literature.  
GG: thats not specific enough!  
GG: thats not  
GG: personal enough  
TT: What do you mean?  
GG: i want to know what you think about them!  
GG: in general i guess  
GG: about what they do  
TT: They sit around and be beautiful and frequently get rescued by princes.  
GG: yes! thats exactly it!  
GG: but what do you think about that?  
TT: I've never really paid it much mind before.  
GG: ok, well  
GG: remember that secret admirer i told you about?  
TT: Vaguely.  
GG: they compared me to a whole bunch of princesses!  
GG: i think just about all of the princesses  
TT: All of them?  
GG: all of them!  
GG: but then i actually read the fairy tales they come from all the way through  
GG: and  
GG: i do not know if i want to be a princess, rose! :(  
GG: because that is exactly what they do  
GG: they sit around  
GG: and they are beautiful  
GG: and they get rescued  
GG: but they dont DO anything!  
GG: they never earn anything and they do not even try to fight for anything  
GG: nothing really matters to them except princes  
GG: even when they do not even know a prince  
GG: just the idea of princes  
GG: but they have no friends that they care about and no goals and never any intention to actually do any work to get to them!  
GG: sorry  
GG: you must not be very interested :/  
TT: No, this is an interesting perspective. Most people are very fond of the classic fairy tales and they aren't often examined so thoroughly.  
GG: ok  
GG: well  
GG: before you start to psychoanalyze my fairy tale thoughts! :p  
GG: i want to hear what you have to think too  
GG: about princesses  
GG: and the things that they do and the things that they do not  
TT: Do you?  
TT: I think you've adequately summed up all there is to say about princesses.  
GG: rose, tell me!  
TT: Ok, if you insist.  
TT: Here is what I think about princesses:  
TT: That your secret admirer wasn't wrong about what they said.  
TT: You are all of the good parts of a princess, I think, and none of the bad ones.  
TT: Beauty and joy can come, but neither of those are mutually exclusive with adventure and hard work.  
TT: And I'm sorry to cut this short, but I have a mother calling to me and a couple of preemptively thought-over clipped remarks to make at her.  
TT: Goodbye, Jade.  
- tentacleTherapist [TT] ceased pestering gardenGnostic [GG] -

• • •

Jade is an oblivious, happy-go-lucky little—not an idiot, not a ditz, certainly not a princess at this point—an oblivious, happy-go-lucky little sweetheart something, and Rose is an absolute _fool_. Something was going to go wrong and she knew it from the moment she had sat down in front of the blank sheet of paper with a pen in her hand, an idea in her head, and more weight in her heart than she cared to admit. What worse comparison could there have been for an adventuring wild child like her crush (the word lacks elegance; she always wanted to say _beloved_ but it didn't feel right as long as Jade was still so out of her reach)? All of her letters were one of a kind but even without her own copy she can review it line by line in her head just like she did for the fifth and sixth and tenth and twentieth and umpteenth time before they were sent away, and she can't stop remembering all of her mistakes: this was when her confidence swelled too large, this was when she spoke for too long, this was when her prose tinged lavender in more ways than one, and this was when she lost her chance.

(But really—and she realizes this as she writes in large and hasty pen strokes of a wizard and his mentor and the unsaid hopes left between them that one was too daft to find and the other too scared to point out—she never really had a chance in the first place.)

If there is any princess between the two of them, it certainly isn't Jade (even with her skyward tower built away from the rest of the world, her Rapunzelesque hair that doesn't match the same shade as storybooks, her dreamy nature and the fairy tale logic that fuels it, and all of her beauty). Rose is the one who has sang about impossible wishes all this time, except she's fumbled to find and hold the key that these melodies are meant for. Before all of that came the Brothers Grimm, though, and she had found their tales before any gentler adaptation, and none of the princesses there had ever, ever found a _real_ happy ending.

• • •

After that, she stops receiving love letters.

• • •

The princess of Prospit cannot save her people (really, though, was she ever theirs in the first place, and were they ever hers?). What she can do is save their prince; she throws him out of the way and the meteor crushes her instead.

She cannot even save herself.

(But when all is said and done, she did better than Sleeping Beauty.)

• • •

No prince was coming, and Rapunzel didn't care.

Why was she always in wait? What did she have to wait for? For all of these years she had dreamed of the world without touching a toe outside of her walls. What was the point in being engulfed by a wish if she didn't do anything, _everything_ to make it come true?

Fate had nothing for her. If the pages were blank, then she had to write them herself. If they were already written, well, she had fires to light and papers to burn.

Rapunzel took the ribbon she had always, always had, and strung it through her hair. She wove it around the flowers and through all of the dirt they brought and sliced it on the thorns. At last she gathered all of the wrong-colored locks that had grown and grown and split at the ends and tangled over so many years of being left unattended. The braid was sloppy but strong and coiled up on the floor at her feet. The stool she'd always kept to wait on was taller than her window was wide, so she looped her hair through its wooden legs and tied the ragged ends in knots at it, braced it up against the window, crawled her way through, and jumped.

Immediately she tried to gain traction against the wall but her shoes wouldn't allow it so she kicked them away and stilled herself on the tower with her bare feet. She went one step at a time with her hair wound up in her arms. Birds had started to gather with he squirrels not far behind them, and on the ground below came the deer and rabbits who knew of her but could never reach her window. They sang, "Rapunzel, Rapunzel!" as she descended. In her last step she jumped three feet down into a flowerbed surrounding the tower base, touched solid ground, and the woods and all of their creatures grew silent.

She breathed in, deep and slow, and held the fresh air in as long as she could. Her toes wormed into the dirt and iris stems poked through in between them, The world stretched out before her in shades of green and radiant blues and rainbows she had only dreamed of seeing in full. The horizon had never seemed father away but only because it was so vast and it gave her the world to walk across.

But when she moved, she was pulled back. Her hair had reached its very end and held taut against the wall. No, not now, not here! Desperately, she yanked at it and tried to tear it down but the stool head fast inside the window.

"No, no, _no_!" Rapunzel wailed. The ending had been written; she could rewrite all of the pages in between but it had been decided, and she would never leave. That was simply how it was decided to end. "_NO!_"

And in the flowerbed was a bush of roses and without any mind to her own skin she tore a branch of thorns from it, and sawed it through the braid.

She fell forward to her knees and the creatures of the wood flocked to her. When she stood again she leaned onto a deer's offered antler to find stability against her new center of gravity. What a sight Rapunzel had become; a princess made of scraped-up knees and bloodied palms, bare feet covered in dirt and torn and worn in her climb, hair in the wrong color left raggedly chopped off at her waist, and still fidgeting.

She took one step forward, shaky, and another with just a little more strength. She let go of the deer and took wobbly steps with the forest's fauna behind her, crooning, "Rapunzel, Rapunzel, we knew you could do it!"

"Me too," she said at last, and, breaking into a crooked grin, strode across the field towards the city beyond.

• • •

• • •

- gardenGnostic [GG] began pestering tentacleTherapist [TT] –-  
GG: rose?  
GG: you are going to the furthest ring soon, right?  
TT: Should everything go as planned, yes.  
GG: ok  
GG: i figured  
GG: before you left though  
GG: i wanted to tell you  
GG: uhh  
GG: remember how last year we talked about princesses?  
GG: i know it was a while ago  
GG: rose?  
TT: Yes.  
TT: I remember.  
GG: well i was thinking about that and  
GG: i think  
GG: that you are one of those princesses that you talked about then  
GG: a purple dersite princess  
GG: of mansions and squids and cats  
GG: who is brave and hard working  
GG: who fights for what she wants and whos important to her  
GG: instead of waiting for someone else to do it all and then rescue you  
GG: but youre the good parts too!  
GG: you are also clever and kind and pretty  
GG: and im so glad youre my friend  
GG: and i wanted you to know that before you left!  
GG: just in case something  
GG: you know  
GG: just in case  
TT: Jade  
GG: good luck, rose  
TT: Jade.  
TT: I love you.  
- tentacleTherapist [TT] ceased pestering gardenGnostic [GG] -  
- gardenGnostic [GG] began pestering tentacleTherapist [TT] -  
- tentacleTherapist [TT] ceased pestering gardenGnostic [GG] -  
- gardenGnostic [GG] began pestering tentacleTherapist [TT] -  
- tentacleTherapist [TT] ceased pestering gardenGnostic [GG] -  
- gardenGnostic [GG] began pestering tentacleTherapist [TT] -  
GG: ROSE!  
GG: rose  
GG: i love you too 3

• • •

The medium had already foresaw Rapunzel's arrival and she was waiting in the center of the town when she came. She'd expected, naturally, someone struggling to take in all of the pieces of a drastically different world, and that was exactly what she'd received. She also got an entourage of forest animals coming in Rapunzel's wake, scratched-up and filthy feet without any shoes, hair shorter than she remembered that look like it was cut with a hacksaw, and a princess with blood and dirt and rips and stains all over her. That, she was less ready for.

But she was beaming with a lopsided smile full of teeth too big, and her joy shone more radiant than anything else gold and glittering, and she was absolutely beautiful.

Before the seer could even spit out a "welcome", Rapunzel had suddenly grabbed her and lifted her up off of her feet in a crushing embrace and she cried, "I'm so happy to see you!" and the medium could see, in the corners of her eyes, birds flying circles around them and dropping scraps of paper in their wake, pieces of love letters left unsent that got exactly where they needed to be.


End file.
